Odds and Ends

Got a few things, none of which actually warrants it’s own post.  However:

1) For some inexplicable reason, the Army wants to award me a GCM 6 years after I got out.  There is no way I can accept it, right?  Although technically I suppose my conduct might be construed as “good” it takes a pretty liberal interpretation.  Among my highlowlights were helping to start up the Sniper newsletter that accused our command of gross incompetance, getting VTWoody off on charges of assaulting a superior by arguing self defense, and then arguing the other guy as self-defense as well, and managing to piss off my 1SG to the point that he “1” blocked me on my NCOER and my complaining in response that I felt I deserved even less than that.  Anyone thinking I deserve a GCM must be high.

2) Speaking of getting high, WTF is Demi Moore doing?  Seriously, don’t rich folks have any better way of getting high than Whip-Its?  I remember my best friend doing Whip Its at the 4th of July Dead Show in Rich Stadium (Buffalo) in like 1992(?) and he walked up an off ramp and didn’t ajust his body accordingly and just kind of rolled down the ramp.  But come on, we were just dumbasses, she should have better means, no?

Either way, as I remarked last night on Facebook, maybe she is trying to ressurect the Askesian Society.  That comment was responded to with the greatest compliment I have ever receieved from Loopy Libertarian who said: “you’re turning into quite the Dennis Miller, with your obscure references.”  If there is one person I would like to be in this world besides the Tom Brady’s manservant, it would be Dennis Miller.  Nonetheless, regarding the Askesian Society (from an excerpt from the greatest book on Science that exists:

“In the early 1800s there arose in England a fashion for inhaling nitrous oxide or laughing gas after it was discovered that its use ‘was attended by a highly pleasurable thrilling.’ For the next half century it would be the drug of choice for young people. One learned body, the Askesian Society, was for a time devoted to little else. Theaters put on ‘laughing gas evenings’ where volunteers could refresh themselves with a robust inhalation and then entertain the audience with their comical staggerings.

“It wasn’t until 1846 that anyone got around to finding a practical use for nitrous oxide as an anesthetic. Goodness knows how many tens of thousands of people suffered unnecessary agonies under the surgeon’s knife because no one thought of the gas’s most obvious practical application. …

“A brilliant young man named Humphry Davy was appointed the Royal Institution’s professor of [the burgeoning new science of] chemistry shortly after its inception in 1799 and rapidly gained fame as an outstanding lecturer and productive experimentalist. … Soon after taking up his position Davy began to bang out new elements one after another – potassium, sodium, magnesium, calcium, strontium, and aluminum or aluminium, depending on which branch of English you favor. He discovered so many elements, not so much because he was serially astute as because he developed an ingenious technique of applying electricity to a molten substance – electrolysis as it is known. Altogether he discovered a dozen elements, a fifth of the known total of his day. Davy might have done far more but unfortunately as a young man he developed an abiding attachment to the buoyant pleasures of nitrous oxide. He grew so attached to the gas that he drew on it (literally) three or four times a day. Eventually in 1829 it is thought to have killed him.”

3) Jonn is about to bust out some phony busting on reporters that should have known better.  I am salivating at the thought.

4) I am headed with my wife to St Louis to the Iraq Vets Welcome Home Parade thing this weekend if anyone will be in attendance, you should come share a Guinness with me.

5) I don’t generally read Foreign Affairs.  It just seems like the kind of mental masturbation that only people who read the New Yorker and dream of owning a summer place in the Berkshires would give a shit about.  Virtually unreadable.  But there’s a semi-interesting piece in there today which I read because I had nothing else to read while at lunch.  It is entitled The Future of History: Can Liberal Democracy Survive the Decline of the?Middle Class?  From the summary:

Something strange is going on in the world today. The global financial crisis that began in 2008 and the ongoing crisis of the euro are both products of the model of lightly regulated financial capitalism that emerged over the past three decades. Yet despite widespread anger at Wall Street bailouts, there has been no great upsurge of left-wing American populism in response.

There are several reasons for this lack of left-wing mobilization, but chief among them is a failure in the realm of ideas. For the past generation, the ideological high ground on economic issues has been held by a libertarian right. The left has not been able to make a plausible case for an agenda other than a return to an unaffordable form of old-fashioned social democracy. This absence of a plausible progressive counter­narrative is unhealthy, because competition is good for intellectual ­debate just as it is for economic activity. And serious intellectual debate is urgently needed, since the current form of globalized capitalism is eroding the middle-class social base on which liberal democracy rests.

 

 

 

Category: Politics